arXiv Machine Learning By Jonathan Williams, Esin Tureci Karthik R. Narasimhan

Adapter Thickets: Splitting an RLVR Budget Beats Concentrating It

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The paper investigates how reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) interacts with majority voting over sampled completions, a common test‑time scaling technique. It shows that training a single LoRA adapter with the full RLVR budget can improve single‑sample accuracy but often harms the overall majority‑vote performance because the policy’s errors become increasingly correlated. By splitting the same training budget across multiple adapters—each trained on a disjoint shard, forming an "adapter thicket"—the authors demonstrate that this approach consistently out‑votes the fully trained single adapter and preserves most of the single‑sample gains, especially when the number of votes is large.

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